The barbs are once again flying over August’s Census debacle, which saw millions of Australians fail to complete the survey online amid heavy user traffic and accusations of hacking.
Yesterday, ABS chief statistician, David Kalisch, told the Senate that the 40-hour outage will cost taxpayers up to $30 million, and apologised to the Australian people:
“The ABS tested the patience and commitment of many households especially through the difficulties accessing the call centre and the unavailability of the census online form for nearly two days”…
“We made a difficult decision to take the system off line on August 9 to ensure the security of census data, but we should not have got to that point, and the system should have been robust to denial of service events.”
“The ABS made a number of poor judgments in our preparation for the 2016 census that led to the poor service experienced by many households. I apologise to the community on behalf of the ABS and I repeat that apology sincerely again today.”
Blame is being passed around the three main stakeholders – the Turnbull Government, the ABS, and IBM.
As reported in The Australian, IBM has blamed subcontractors for the website bungle, in particular a company named NextGen, which was employed to implement a geo-blocking mechanism dubbed “Island Australia” to stop distributed denial of service attacks, but failed to do its job.
While admitting that the ABS did a poor job, Kalisch deflected blame to IBM, claiming the company did not “adequately address” or prepare for the risk of attacks.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has ordered an inquiry into the census to determine “which heads will roll and when”.
Expect the recriminations and arse covering to continue as investigations into the bungle roll-on.
